Читать книгу Lineages of the Absolutist State - Perry Anderson - Страница 10
ОглавлениеFrance presents an evolution very distinct from the Hispanic pattern. Absolutism there enjoyed no such early advantages as in Spain, in the form of a lucrative overseas empire. Nor, on the other hand, was it confronted with the permanent structural problems of fusing disparate kingdoms at home, with radically contrasted political and cultural legacies. The Capetian monarchy, as we have seen, had slowly extended its suzerain rights outwards from its original base in the He de France, in a gradual movement of concentric unification during the Middle Ages, until they reached from Flanders to the Mediterranean. It never had to contend with another territorial realm within France of comparable feudal rank: there was only one kingship in the Gallic lands, apart from the small and semi-Iberian State of Navarre in the remote folds of the Pyrenees. The outlying duchies and counties of France had always owed nominal allegiance to the central dynasty, even if as vassals initially more powerful than their royal overlord – permitting a juridical hierarchy that facilitated later political integration. The social and linguistic differences that divided the South from the North, although persistent and pronounced, were never quite as great as those set the East off from the West in Spain. The separate legal system and language of the Midi did not coincide, fortunately for the monarchy, with the main military and diplomatic rift which split France in the later Middle Ages: the house of Burgundy, the major rival power ranged against the Capetian dynasty, was a Northern duchy. Southern particularism nevertheless remained a constant, latent force in the early modern epoch, assuming masked forms and novel guises in successive crises. The real political control of the French monarchy was never territorially uniform: it always ebbed at the extremities of the country, progressively decreasing in the more recently acquired provinces farthest from Paris. At the same time, the sheer demographic size of France in itself posed formidable obstacles for administrative unification: some 20 million inhabitants made it at least twice as populous as Spain in the 16th century. The rigidity and clarity of the domestic barriers to a unitary Absolutism in Spain were consequently balanced by the thicker profusion and variety of regional life contained within the French polity. No linear constitutional advance thus occurred after the Capetian consolidation in mediaeval France. On the contrary, the history of the construction of French Absolutism was to be that of a ‘convulsive’ progression towards a centralized monarchical State, repeatedly interrupted by relapses into provincial disintegration and anarchy, followed by an intensified reaction towards concentration of royal power, until finally an extremely hard and stable structure was achieved. The three great breakdowns of political order were, of course, the Hundred Years’ War in the 15th century, the Religious Wars in the 16th century, and the Fronde in the 17th century. The transition from the mediaeval to the Absolute monarchy was each time first arrested, and then accelerated by these crises, whose ultimate outcome was to create a cult of royal authority in the epoch of Louis XIV with no equal anywhere else in Western Europe.
The slow concentric centralization of the Capetian kings, discussed earlier, had come to an abrupt end with the extinction of the line in the mid 14th century, which proved the signal for the onset of the Hundred Years’ War. The outbreak of violent magnate feuds within France itself, under weak Valois rulers, eventually led to the combined Anglo-Burgundian attack on the French monarchy of the early 15th century, which shattered the unity of the realm. At the height of the English and Burgundian successes in the 1420’s, virtually the entire traditional demesne of the royal house in Northern France lay under alien control, while Charles VII was driven into flight and exile in the South. The general story of the eventual recovery of the French monarchy and the expulsion of the English armies is well known. For our purposes here, the critical legacy of the long ordeal of the Hundred Years’ War was its ultimate contribution to the fiscal and military emancipation of the monarchy from the limits of the prior mediaeval polity. For the war was only won by abandoning the seigneurial ban system of knightly service, which had proved disastrously ineffective against the English archers, and creating a regular paid army whose artillery proved the decisive weapon for victory. To raise this army, the first important country-wide tax to be collected by the monarchy was granted by the French aristocracy – the taille royale of 1439, which became the regular taille des gens d’armes in the 1440’s.1 The nobility, clergy and certain towns were exempt from it, and in the course of the next century the legal definition of nobility in France became hereditary exemption from the taille. The monarchy thus emerged strengthened in the later 15th century to the extent that it now possessed an embryonic regular army in the compagnies d’ordonnance, captained by the aristocracy, and a direct fiscal levy not subject to any representative control.
On the other hand, Charles VII made no attempt to tighten central dynastic authority in the Northern provinces of France, when they were successively reconquered: in fact, he promoted assemblies of regional Estates and transferred financial and judicial powers to local institutions. Just as the Capetian rulers had accompanied their extension of monarchical control with cession of princely appanages, so the early Valois kings combined reassertion of royal unity with provincial devolution to an entrenched aristocracy. The reason in both cases was the same: the sheer administrative difficulty of managing a country the size of France with the instruments of rule available to the dynasty. The coercive and fiscal apparatus of the central State was still very small: Charles VII’s compagnies d’ordonnance never numbered more than 12,000 troops – a force entirely insufficient for control and repression of a population of 15 million.2 The nobility thus retained autonomous local power by virtue of its own swords, on which the stability of the whole social structure ultimately depended. The advent of a modest royal army had even increased its economic privileges, the institutionalization of the taille securing nobles a complete fiscal immunity they had not hitherto enjoyed. Charles V’s convocation of Estates-Generals, an institution which had lapsed for centuries in France, was thus inspired precisely by his need to create a minimal national forum in which he could induce the various provincial estates and towns to accept taxation, ratify treaties and provide advice on foreign affairs: its sessions, however, rarely granted proper satisfaction to his demands. The Hundred Years’ War thus bequeathed to the French monarchy permanent troops and taxes, but little new civilian administration on a national scale. English intervention had been cleared from French soil: Burgundian ambitions remained. Louis XI, who succeeded in 1461, tackled both internal and external opposition to Valois power with grim resolution. His steady resumption of provincial appanages such as Anjou, systematic packing of municipal governments in the major towns, arbitrary exaction of heavier taxes and quelling of aristocratic intrigues, greatly increased the royal authority and treasury in France. Above all, Louis XI secured the whole eastern flank of the French monarchy by encompassing the downfall of its most dangerous rival and enemy, the Burgundian dynasty. Fomenting the Swiss cantons against the neighbouring Duchy, he financed the first great European defeat of feudal cavalry by an infantry army: with the rout of Charles the Bold by the Swiss pikemen at Nancy in 1477, the Burgundian State collapsed and Louis XI annexed the bulk of the Duchy. In the next two decades, Charles VIII and Louis XII absorbed Brittany, the last major independent principality, by successive marriages to its heiress. The French realm now for the first time bounded all the vassal provinces of the mediaeval epoch, beneath a single sovereign. The extinction of most of the great houses of the Middle Ages and the reintegration of their domains into the lands of the monarchy, threw into prominent relief the apparent dominance of the Valois dynasty itself.
In fact, however, the ‘new monarchy’ inaugurated by Louis XI was by no means a centralized or integrated State. France was redivided into some 12 governorships, administration over which was entrusted to royal princes or leading nobles, who legally exercised a wide range of regalian rights down to the end of the century and factually could act as autonomous potentates well into the next.3 Moreover, there now also developed a cluster of local parlements, provincial courts created by the monarchy with supreme judicial authority in their areas, whose importance and numbers steadily grew in this epoch: between the accession of Charles VII and the death of Louis XII, new parlements were founded in Toulouse, Grenoble, Bordeaux, Dijon, Rouen and Aix. Nor were urban liberties yet gravely curtailed, although the position of the patrician oligarchy within them was reinforced at the expense of the guilds and small masters. The essential reason for these far-reaching limitations of the central State remained the insurmountable organizational problems of imposing an effective apparatus of royal rule over the whole country, amidst an economy without a unified market or modernized transport system, in which the dissociation of primary feudal relations in the village was by no means complete. The social ground for vertical political centralization was not yet ready, despite the notable gains registered by the monarchy. It was in this context that the Estates-General found a new lease of life after the Hundred Years’ War, not against but with the revival of the monarchy. For in France, as elsewhere, the initial impulse for the convocation of the Estates was the dynastic need for fiscal or foreign policy support from the subjects of the realm.4 In France, however, the consolidation of the Estates-General as a permanent national institution was blocked by the same diversity which had obliged the monarchy to accept wide political devolution even in the hour of its unitary victory. It was not that the three estates were especially divided socially when they met: the moyenne noblesse dominated their proceedings without much effort. But the regional assemblies which had elected their deputies to the Estates-General always refused to mandate them to vote national taxes; and since the nobility was exempt from the existing fisc, it had little incentive to press for the convocation of the Estates-General.5 The result was that since the French kings were unable to get the financial contributions they wanted from the national Estates, they gradually ceased to summon them at all. It was thus the regional entrenchment of local seigneurial power, rather than the centralist drive of the monarchy, which frustrated the emergence of a national Parliament in Renaissance France. In the short-run, this was to contribute to a complete break-down of royal authority; in the long-run, of course, it was to facilitate the task of Absolutism.
In the first half of the 16th century, Francis I and Henry II presided over a prosperous and multiplying realm. There was a steady decrease of representative activity: the Estates-General had lapsed again; the towns were no longer summoned after 1517 and foreign policy tended to become a more exclusively royal preserve. Legal officials – maîtres de requêtes – gradually extended the juridical rights of the monarchy, and parlements were overawed by special sessions or lits de justice in the presence of the king. Control of appointments in the ecclesiastical hierarchy was gained by the Concordat of Bologna with the Papacy. But neither Francis I nor Henry II were yet anything like autocratic rulers: they both consulted frequently with regional assemblies and carefully respected traditional noble privileges. The economic immunities of the Church were not infringed by the change of patronage over it (unlike the situation in Spain, where the clergy were heavily taxed by the monarchy). Royal edicts still in principle needed formal registration by the parlements to become law. Fiscal revenues doubled between 1517 and the 1540’s, but the tax-level at the end of Francis I’s reign was not appreciably above that of Louis XI sixty years earlier, although prices and incomes had risen greatly in the interval:6 the direct fiscal yield as a proportion of national wealth thus actually fell. On the other hand, the issue of public bonds to rentiers from 1522 onwards helped to maintain the royal treasury comfortably. Dynastic prestige at home was meanwhile assisted by the constant external wars in Italy into which the Valois rulers led their nobility: for these became a well-established outlet for the perennial pugnacity of the gentry. The long French effort to win ascendancy in Italy, launched by Charles VIII in 1494 and concluded by the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559, was unsuccessful. The Spanish monarchy – politically and militarily more advanced, strategically commanding the Habsburg bases in Northern Europe, and navally superior through its Genoese alliance – cleanly routed its French rival for control of the transalpine peninsula. Victory in this contest went to the State whose process of Absolutization was earlier and more developed. Ultimately, however, defeat in its first foreign adventure probably helped to ensure a sounder and more compact foundation for French Absolutism, forced back in on its own domestic territory. Immediately, on the other hand, it was the termination of the Italian wars, combined with the uncertainty of a succession crisis, which was to reveal how insecurely the Valois monarchy was still anchored in the country. The death of Henry II precipitated France into forty years of internecine strife.
The Civil Wars which raged after Cateau-Cambresis were, of course, set off by the religious conflicts attendant on the Reformation. But they provided a kind of radiography of the body politic in the late 16th century, in the way in which they exposed the multiple tensions and contradictions of the French social formation in the epoch of the Renaissance. For the struggle between the Huguenots and the Holy League for control of the monarchy, in practice politically vacant after the death of Henry II and the regency of Catherine of Medici, served as an arena for the coalescence of virtually every type of internal political conflict characteristic of the transition towards Absolutism. The Religious Wars were led, from first to last, by the three rival magnate lineages of Guise, Montmorency and Bourbon, each controlling a domanial territory, extensive clientele, leverage inside the State apparatus, loyal troops and international connections. The Guise family was master of the North-East from Lorraine to Burgundy; the Montmorency-Chatillon line was based on hereditary lands stretching through the whole Centre of the country; the Bourbon bastions lay essentially in the South-West. The inter-feudal struggle between these noble houses was intensified by the plight of needy rural squires all over France, previously habituated to plundering forays into Italy and now caught by the price inflation; this stratum provided military cadres ready for prolonged civil warfare, quite apart from the religious affiliations which divided it. Moreover, as the struggle wore on, the towns themselves split into two camps: many of the Southern cities rallying to the Huguenots, while the Northern inland towns became virtually without exception bulwarks of the League. It has been argued that differing commercial orientations (to the overseas or domestic market) influenced this division.7 It seems more probable, however, that the general geographical pattern of Huguenotism reflected a traditional regional separatism of the South, which had always lain farthest from the Capetian homelands in the He de France, and where the local territorial potentates had kept their independence longest. At the start, Protestantism had generally spread from Switzerland into France via the main river-systems of the Rhone, Loire and Rhine,8 providing a fairly even regional distribution of the Reformed faith. But once official toleration ceased, it rapidly reconcentrated in the Dauphine, Languedoc, Guyenne, Poitou, Saintonge, Beam and Gascgony – mountainous or coastal zones beyond the Loire, many of them harsh and poor, whose common characteristics were not so much commercial vitality as manorial particularism. Huguenotism always mustered artisans and burghers in its towns, but the appropriation of tithes by Calvinist notables ensured that the appeal of the new creed to the peasantry was very limited. Huguenot social leadership, in fact, was drawn overwhelmingly from the landowning class, where it could claim perhaps half the nobility in France in the 1560’s – while it never surpassed more than 10–20 per cent of the population as a whole.9 Religion retreated in the South into the embrace of aristocratic dissidence. The general strain of the confessional conflict can be seen as thus simply having split the tenuous fabric of French unity along its inherently weakest seam.
Once under way, however, the struggle unleashed deeper social conflicts than those of feudal secessionism. When the South was lost to Conde and the Protestant armies, a redoubled weight of royal taxation for the war fell on the beleaguered Catholic cities of the North. The urban misery that resulted from this development in the 1580’s provoked a radicalization of the Holy League in the towns, compounded by Henry III’s assassination of Guise. While the ducal lords of the Guise clan – Mayenne, Aumale, Elbeuf, Mercoeur – detached Lorraine, Brittany, Normandy and Burgundy in the name of Catholicism, and Spanish armies invaded from Flanders and Catalonia to aid the League, municipal revolutions exploded in the Northern cities. Power was seized in Paris by a dictatorial committee of discontented lawyers and clerics, backed by the famished plebeian masses and a fanatical phalanx of friars and preachers.10 Orléans, Bourges, Dijon, Lyon followed suit. Once the Protestant Henry of Navarre became the legal successor to the monarchy, the ideology of these urban revolts started to veer towards republicanism. At the same time, the tremendous devastation of the countryside by the constant military campaigns of these decades pushed the South-Central peasantry of Limousin, Périgord, Quercy, Poitou and Saintonge into menacingly non-religious risings in the 1590’s. It was this dual radicalization in town and country that finally reunited the ruling class: the nobility started to close ranks as soon as there was a real danger of an upheaval from below. Henry IV tactically accepted Catholicism, rallied the aristocratic patrons of the League, isolated the Committees, and suppressed the peasant revolts. The Religious Wars ended in a reaffirmed royal state.
French Absolutism now came relatively rapidly of age, although there was still to be one radical setback before it was definitively established. Its great administrative architects in the 17th century were, of course, Sully, Richelieu and Colbert. The size and diversity of the country were still largely unconquered when they began their work. Royal princes remained jealous rivals of the monarch, often in possession of hereditary governorships. Provincial parlements composed of a combination of rural gentry and lawyers represented bastions of traditional particularism. A commercial bourgeoisie was growing in Paris and other cities, and controlled municipal power. The French masses had been aroused by the civil wars of the previous century, when both sides had at different times appealed to them for support, and retained memories of popular insurgency.11 The specific character of the French Absolutist state which emerged in the grand siècle was designed to fit, and master, this complex of forces. Henry IV fixed royal presence and power centrally in Paris for the first time, rebuilding the city and making it into the permanent capital of the kingdom. Civic pacification was accompanied by official care for agricultural recovery and promotion of export trades. The popular prestige of the monarchy was restored by the personal magnetism of the founder of the new Bourbon dynasty himself. The Edict of Nantes and its supplementary articles contained the problem of Protestantism, by conceding it limited regional autonomy. No Estates-General was summoned, despite promises to do so made during the civil war. External peace was maintained, and with it administrative economy. Sully, the Huguenot Chancellor, doubled the net revenues of the State, mainly by shifting to indirect taxes, rationalizing tax-farms and cutting expenses. The most important institutional development of the reign was the introduction of the paulette in 1604: sale of offices in the state apparatus, which had existed for over a century, was stabilized by Paulet’s device of rendering them inheritable, in exchange for payment of a small annual percentage on their purchase value – a measure designed not only to increase the income of the monarchy, but also to insulate the bureaucracy from magnate influence. Under the frugal regime of Sully, sale of offices still represented only some 8 per cent of budget receipts.12 But from the minority of Louis XIII onwards, this proportion rapidly altered. A recrudescence of noble factionalism and religious unrest, marked by the last and ineffectual session of the Estates-General (1614–15) before the French Revolution, and the first aggressive intervention of the Parlement of Paris against a royal government, led to the brief dominance of the Due de Luynes. Pensions to buy off captious grandees and resumption of war against the Huguenots in the South increased state expenditures greatly. Henceforward, the bureaucracy and judiciary was to pullulate with the largest single volume of venal transactions in Europe. France became the classical land of sale of offices, as an ever-growing number of sinecures and prebends were created by the monarchy for revenue purposes. By 1620–4, the traffic in these provided some 38 per cent of royal revenues.13 Tax-farms, furthermore, were now regularly auctioned to large financiers, whose collecting systems might tap up to two-thirds of fiscal receipts on their way to the State. The steeply rising costs of foreign and domestic policy in the new international conjuncture of the Thirty Years’ War, moreover, were such that the monarchy had constantly to resort to forced loans at high interest rates from the syndicates of its own tax-farmers, who were themselves at the same time officiers who had bought positions in the treasury section of the State apparatus.14 This vicious circle of financial improvisation inevitably maximized confusion and corruption. The multiplication of venal offices, in which a new noblesse de robe now became lodged, impeded any firm dynastic hold over major agencies of public justice and finance, and dispersed bureaucratic power both centrally and locally.
Yet it was in the same epoch that, curiously interlaced with this system, Richelieu and his successors started to build a rationalized administrative machine capable for the first time of direct royal control and intervention throughout France. De facto ruler of the country from 1624 onwards, the Cardinal proceeded promptly to liquidate the remaining Huguenot fortresses in the South-West, with the siege and capture of La Rochelle; crushed successive aristocratic conspiracies with summary executions; abolished the highest mediaeval military dignities; levelled noble castles and banned duelling; and suppressed Estates where local resistance permitted (Normandy). Above all, Richelieu effectively created the intendant system. The Intendants de Justice, de Police et de Finances were functionaries dispatched with omnibus powers into the provinces, at first on temporary and ad hoc missions, who later became permanent commissioners of the central government throughout France. Appointed directly by the monarchy, their offices were revocable and non-purchasable: normally recruited from the earlier maîtres de rêquites and themselves small or medium nobles in the 17th century, they represented the new power of the Absolutist State in the farthest reaches of the realm. Extremely unpopular with the officier stratum, on whose local prerogatives they infringed, they were used with caution at first, and coexisted with the traditional governorships of the provinces. But Richelieu broke the quasi-hereditary character of these regional lordships, long the peculiar prey of the highest aristocratic magnates, so that by the end of his rule, only a quarter were still held by men who predated his accession to power. There was thus a simultaneous and contradictory development of both officier and commissaire groups within the overall structure of the State during this period. While the role of the intendants grew progressively more prominent and authoritarian, the magistrature of the various parlements of the land, champions of legalism and particularism, became the most vocal spokesmen of officier resistance to them, intermittently hemming the initiatives of the royal government.
The compositional form of the French monarchy thus came, both in theory and practice, to acquire an extreme, ornate complexity. Kossmann has described its contours for the consciousness of the possessing classes of the time, in a striking passage: ‘Contemporaries felt that Absolutism in no way excluded that tension which seemed to them inherent in the State and altered none of their ideas of government. For them, the State was like a baroque church in which a great number of different conceptions mingle, clash and are finally absorbed into a single magnificent system. Architects had recently discovered the oval, and space came alive in their ingenious arrangements of it: everywhere the splendour of oval forms, gleaming from their corners, projected onto the construction as a whole the supple energy and swaying, uncertain rhythms cherished by the new style.’15 These ‘aesthetic’ principles of French Absolutism, nevertheless, corresponded to functional purposes. The relationship between taxes and dues in the traditional epoch, as has been seen, has been termed a tension between ‘centralized’ and ‘local’ feudal rent. This ‘economic’ duplication was in a sense reproduced in the ‘political’ structures of French Absolutism. For it was the very complexity of the architecture of the State which permitted a slow yet relentless unification of the noble class itself, which was gradually adapted into a new centralized mould, subject to the public control of the intendants, while still occupying privately owned positions within the officier system and local authority in the provincial parlements. Simultaneously, moreover, it achieved the feat of integrating the nascent French bourgeoisie into the circuit of the feudal state. For the purchase of offices represented such a profitable investment that capital was perpetually diverted away from manufacturing or mercantile ventures into a usurious collusion with the Absolutist State. Sinecures and fees, tax-farms and loans, honours and bonds all drew bourgeois wealth away from production. The acquisition of noble titles and fiscal immunity became normal entrepreneurial goals for roturiers. The social consequence was to create a bourgeoisie which tended to become increasingly assimilated to the aristocracy itself, via the exemptions and privileges of offices. The State, in its turn, sponsored royal manufactures and public trading companies which, from Sully to Colbert, provided business outlets for this class.16 The result was to ‘side-track’ the political evolution of the French bourgeoisie for a hundred and fifty years.
The weight of this whole apparatus fell on the poor. The reorganized feudal State proceeded to batten mercilessly on the rural and urban masses. The extent to which local commutation of dues and growth of a monetarized agriculture were compensated by centralized pumping of the surplus from the peasantry can be seen with stark clarity in the French case. In 1610, the fiscal agents of the State collected 17 million livres from the taille. By 1644, the exactions of this tax had trebled to 44 million livres. Total taxation actually quadrupled in the decade after 1630.17 The reason for this sudden and enormous increase in the fiscal burden was, of course, Richelieu’s diplomatic and military intervention in the Thirty Years’ War. Mediated at first by subventions to Sweden and then by hire of German mercenaries, it ended with large French armies in the field. The international effect was decisive. France settled the fate of Germany and destroyed the ascendancy of Spain. The Treaty of Westphalia, four years after the historic French victory at Rocroi, extended the frontiers of the French monarchy from the Meuse to the Rhine. The new structures of French Absolutism were thus baptised in the fire of European war. French success in the anti-Spanish struggle, in effect, coincided with domestic consolidation of the dual bureaucratic complex that made up the early Bourbon State. The military emergencies of the conflict facilitated the imposition of intendency in invaded or threatened zones: its huge financial expense at the same time necessitated unprecedented sale of offices and yielded spectacular fortunes for banking syndicates. The real costs of the war were borne by the poor, among whom it wrought social havoc. The fiscal pressures of war-time Absolutism provoked a constant ground-swell of desperate revolts by the urban and rural masses throughout these decades. There were town riots in Dijon, Aix and Poitiers in 1630; jacqueries in the countryside of Angoumois, Saintonge, Poitou, Périgord and Guyenne in 1636–7; a major plebeian and peasant rebellion in Normandy in 1639. The more important regional upsurges were interspersed with constant minor outbreaks of unrest against tax-collectors over large areas of France, frequently patronized by local gentry. Royal troops were regularly deployed for repression at home, while the international conflict was being fought abroad.
The Fronde can in certain respects be regarded as a high ‘crest’ of this long wave of popular revolts,18 in which for a brief period sections of the top nobility, the office-holding magistrature and the municipal bourgeoisie used mass discontents for their own ends against the Absolutist State. Mazarin, who succeeded Richelieu in 1642, had skilfully steered French foreign policy through to the end of the Thirty Years’ War, and with it the acquisition of Alsace. After the Peace of Westphalia, however, Mazarin provoked the crisis of the Fronde by prolonging the anti-Spanish war into the Mediterranean theatre, where as an Italian he aimed at the sequestration of Naples and Catalonia. Fiscal extortion and financial manipulation to support the military effort abroad coincided with successive bad harvests in 1647, 1649 and 1651. Popular hunger and fury combined with a war-weary revolt of officiers led by the Parlement of Paris against the intendant system; the disgruntlement of rentiers at an emergency devaluation of government bonds; and the jealousy of powerful peers of the realm at an Italian adventurer manipulating a royal minority. The upshot was a confused and bitter mêlée in which, once again, the country seemed to fall apart as provinces detached themselves from Paris, marauding private armies wandered across the land, towns set up rebel municipal dictatorships, and complex manoeuvres and intrigues divided and reunited the rival princes competing for control of the court. Provincial governors sought to settle scores with local parlements, while municipal authorities seized the opportunity to attack the regional magistratures.19 The Fronde thus reproduced many elements of the pattern that marked the Religious Wars. This time, the most radical urban insurrection coincided with one of the traditionally most disaffected rural zones: the Ormée of Bordeaux and the extreme South-West were the last centres to hold out against Mazarin’s armies. But the popular seizures of power in Bordeaux and Paris occurred too late to affect the outcome of the criss-crossed conflicts of the Fronde; local Huguenotism in general remained studiously neutral in the South; and no coherent political programme emerged from the Ormée, beyond its instinctual hostility to the local Bordelais bourgeoisie.20 By 1653, Mazarin and Turenne had stamped out the last refuges of revolt. The progress of administrative centralization and class reorganization achieved within the mixed structures of the French monarchy in the 17th century had revealed its efficacy. Although the social pressure from below was probably more urgent, the Fronde was actually less dangerous to the monarchical State than the Religious Wars, because the propertied classes were by now more united. For all the contradictions between the officier and intendant systems, both groups were predominantly recruited from the noblesse de robe, while the bankers and tax-farmers against whom the Parlements protested were in fact closely connected in personnel to them. The annealing process permitted by the coexistence of the two systems within a single State thus ended by ensuring much prompter solidarity against the masses. The very depth of the plebeian unrest revealed by the Fronde shortened the last emotional breakaway of the dissident aristocracy from the monarchy: although there were to be further peasant risings in the 17th century, no conflux of rebellion from above and below ever occurred again. The Fronde cost Mazarin his projected gains in the Mediterranean. But when the Spanish War ended with the Treaty of the Pyrenees, Roussillon and Artois had been added to France; and a picked bureaucratic elite was practised and ready for the imposing administrative order of the next reign. The aristocracy was henceforward to settle down under the consummated, solar Absolutism of Louis XIV.
The new sovereign assumed personal command of the whole state apparatus in. 1661. Once royal authority and executive capacity were reunited in a single ruler, the full political potential of French Absolutism was rapidly realized. The Parlements were silenced, their claim to present remonstrances before registering royal edicts annulled (1673). The other sovereign courts were reduced to obedience. The provincial Estates could no longer dispute and bargain over taxes: precise fiscal demands were dictated by the monarchy, which they were compelled to accept. The municipal autonomy of the bonnes villes was bridled, as mayoralties were domesticated and military garrisons were installed in them. Governorships were granted for three years only, and their holders frequently obliged to reside with the court, rendering them merely honorific. Command of fortified towns in frontier regions was carefully rotated. The higher nobility was forced to reside at Versailles once the new palace complex was completed (1682), and divorced from effective lordship over its territorial domains. These measures against the refractory particularism of traditional institutions and groups provoked, of course, resentment both among the princes and peers, and the provincial gentry. But they did not alter the objective bond between the aristocracy and the State, henceforward more efficacious than ever in protecting the basic interests of the noble class. The degree of economic exploitation guaranteed by French Absolutism can be judged by the recent calculation that throughout the 17th century, the nobility – 2 per cent of the population – appropriated 20–30 per cent of the total national income.21 The central machinery of royal power was thus now concentrated, rationalized and enlarged without serious aristocratic resistance.
Louis XIV inherited his key ministers from Mazarin: Le Tellier, in charge of military affairs, Colbert who came to combine management of the royal finances, household and navy, Lionne who directed foreign policy, and Séguier who as Chancellor handled internal security. These disciplined and competent administrators formed the apex of the bureaucratic order now at the disposal of the monarchy. The king presided in person over the deliberations of the small Conseil d’en Haut, comprising his most trusted political servants and excluding all princes and grandees. This became the supreme executive body of the State, while the Conseil des Dépêches dealt with provincial and domestic matters, and the newly created Conseil des Finances supervised the economic organization of the monarchy. The departmental efficacy of this relatively taut system, linked by the tireless activity of Louis XIV himself, was much greater than that of the cumbersome conciliar paraphernalia of Habsburg Absolutism in Spain, with its semi-territorial lay-out and interminable collective ruminations. Below it, the intendant network now covered the whole of France – Brittany was the last province to receive a commissioner in 1689.22 The country was divided into 32 généralités, in each of which the royal intendant now ruled supreme, assisted by sub-délégués, and vested with new powers over the assessment and supervision of the taille – vital duties that were transferred from the old officier ‘treasurers’ formerly in control of them. The total personnel of the civilian sector of the central state apparatus of French Absolutism in the reign of Louis XIV was still very modest: perhaps 1,000 responsible functionaries in all, both at court and in the provinces.23 But these were backed by a massively augmented coercive machinery. A permanent police force was created to keep order and repress riots in Paris (1667), which was ultimately extended throughout France (1698–9). The Army was enormously increased in size during the reign, rising from some 30–50,000 to 300,000 by its end.24 Regular pay, drill and uniforms were introduced by Le Tellier and Louvois; military weaponry and fortifications were modernized by Vauban. The growth of this military apparatus meant the final disarming of the provincial nobility, and the capacity to strike down popular rebellions with dispatch and efficacy.25 The Swiss mercenaries who provided Bourbon Absolutism with its household troops helped to make short work of the Boulonnais and Camisard peasantry; the new dragoons operated the mass ejection of Huguenots from France. The ideological incense surrounding the monarchy, lavishly dispensed by the salaried writers and clerics of the regime, swathed the armed repression on which it relied, but could not conceal it.
French Absolutism achieved its institutional apotheosis in the last decades of the 17th century. The State structure and concordant ruling culture perfected in the reign of Louis XIV was to become the model for much of the rest of the nobility in Europe: Spain, Portugal, Piedmont and Prussia were only the most direct later examples of its influence. But the political rayonnement of Versailles was not an end in itself: the organizational accomplishments of Bourbon Absolutism were designed in the conception of Louis XIV to serve a specific purpose – the superior goal of military expansion. The first decade of the reign, from 1661 to 1672, was essentially one of internal preparation for external adventures ahead. Administratively, economically and culturally these were the most effulgent years of Louis XIV’s rule; nearly all its most lasting work dated from them. Under the able superintendancy of the early Colbert, fiscal pressure was stabilized and trade promoted. State expenses were cut by the wholesale suppression of new offices created since 1630; the depredations of tax-farmers were drastically reduced, although collection was not itself resumed by the State; royal demesne lands were systematically recovered. The taille personnelle was lowered from 42 to 34 million livres; while the taille réelle in the more lightly burdened pays d’états was raised by some 50 per cent; the yield of indirect taxes was increased some 60 per cent by vigilant control of the farming system. The net revenues of the monarchy doubled from 1661 to 1671, and a budgetary surplus was regularly achieved.26 Meanwhile, an ambitious mercantilist programme to accelerate manufacturing and commercial growth in France, and colonial expansion overseas, was launched: royal subventions founded new industries (cloth, glass, tapestry, iron-ware), chartered companies were created to exploit the trade of the East and West Indies, shipyards were heavily subsidised, and finally an extremely protectionist tariff system imposed. It was this very mercantilism, however, which led directly to the decision to invade Holland in 1672, with the intention of suppressing the competition of its trade – which had proved easily superior to French commerce – by incorporating the United Provinces into the French domains. The Dutch war was initially successful: French troops crossed the Rhine, lay within striking distance of Amsterdam, and took Utrecht. An international coalition, however, rapidly rallied to the defense of the status quo – above all, Spain and Austria; while the Orange dynasty regained power within Holland, forging a marital alliance with England. Seven years of fighting ended with France in possession of the Franche-Comté and an improved frontier in Artois and Flanders, but with the United Provinces intact and the anti-Dutch tariff of 1667 retracted: a modest balance-sheet abroad. At home, Colbert’s fiscal retrenchment had been permanently wrecked: sale of offices was multiplied once again, old taxes were increased, new taxes were invented, loans were floated, commercial subsidies were jettisoned. War was henceforward to dominate virtually every aspect of the reign.27 The misery and famine caused by the State’s exactions and a series of bad harvests led to renewed risings of the peasantry in the Guyenne and Brittany in 1674–5, and summary armed suppression of them: this time no lord or squire attempted to use them for his ends. The nobility, relieved of monetary charges that Richelieu and Mazarin had tried to impose on it, remained loyal throughout.28
The restoration of peace for a decade in the 1680s, however, merely accentuated the surquedry of Bourbon Absolutism. The king now became immured in Versailles; ministerial calibre declined, as the generation chosen by Mazarin gave way to more or less mediocre successors by hereditary cooption from the same group of inter-related families in the noblesse de robe; clumsy anti-Papal gestures were mixed with heedless expulsion of Protestants from the realm; creaking legal chicanery was used for a series of small annexations in the North-East. Agrarian depression continued at home, if maritime commerce recovered and boomed, to the apprehension of English and Dutch merchants. The defeat of the French candidate for the Electorate of Cologne, and the accession of William III to the English monarchy, were the signals for the resumption of international conflict. The War of the League of Augsburg (1689–97) ranged virtually the whole of Western and Central Europe against France – Holland, England, Austria, Spain, Savoy, and most of Germany. French armies had been more than doubled in strength, to some 220,000 in the intervening decade. The most they proved able to do was hold the coalition to a costly draw: Louis XIV’s war aims were everywhere frustrated. The sole gain registered by France at the Treaty of Ryswick was European acceptance of the absorption of Strasbourg, secured before the fighting had broken out: all other occupied territories had to be evacuated, while the French navy was driven from the seas. To finance the war effort, a cascade of new offices was invented for sale, titles were auctioned, forced loans and public rents were multiplied, monetary values manipulated, and for the first time a ‘capitation’ tax was imposed that the nobility itself did not escape.29 Inflation, hunger and depopulation ravaged the countryside. But within five years, France was plunged back into the European conflict for the Spanish Succession. Louis XIV’s diplomatic ineptitude and brusque provocations once again maximized the coalition against France in the decisive military contest that was now joined: the advantageous testament of Charles II was flouted for the French heir, Flanders occupied by French troops, Spain directed by French emissaries, the slave-contracts with its American colonies annexed by French merchants, the exiled Stuart claimant ostentatiously hailed as legitimate monarch of England. Bourbon determination to monopolize the totality of the Hispanic Empire, refusing any partition or diminution of the vast Spanish haul, inevitably united Austria, England, Holland, and most of Germany against it. By reaching for everything, French Absolutism eventually secured virtually nothing from its supreme effort of political expansion. The Bourbon armies – now 300,000 strong, equipped with rifles and bayonets – were decimated at Blenheim, Ramillies, Turin, Oudenarde, Malplaquet. France itself was battered by invasion, as tax-farms collapsed at home, the currency was debased, bread riots raged in the capital, frost and famine numbed the countryside. Yet apart from the local Huguenot rising in the Cévennes, the peasantry remained still. Above it, the ruling class was compactly serried about the monarchy, even amidst its autocratic discipline and foreign disasters, which were shaking the whole society.
Tranquillity only came with final defeat in the war. The peace was mitigated by divisions in the victorious coalition against Louis XIV, which allowed the junior branch of the Bourbon dynasty to retain the monarchy in Spain, at the price of political separation from France. Otherwise, the ruinous ordeal had yielded Gallic Absolutism no benefit. It had merely established Austria in the Netherlands and Italy, and made England master of colonial commerce in Spanish America. The paradox of French Absolutism, in fact, was that its greatest domestic florescence did not coincide with its greatest international ascendancy: on the contrary, it was the still defective and incomplete State structure of Richelieu and Mazarin, marked by institutional anomalies and torn by internal upheavals, which achieved spectacular foreign successes, while the consolidated and stabilized monarchy of Louis XIV – with its enormously augmented authority and army – momentously failed to impose itself on Europe, or make notable territorial gains. Institutional construction and international expansion were dephased and inverted in the French case. The reason, of course, lay in the acceleration of a time distinct from that of Absolutism altogether, in the Maritime countries – Holland and England. Spanish Absolutism held European dominance for a hundred years; first checked by the Dutch Revolution, its ascendancy was finally broken by French Absolutism in the mid 17th century, with the aid of Holland. French Absolutism, however, enjoyed no comparable spell of hegemony in Western Europe. Within twenty years of the Treaty of the Pyrenees, its expansion had already been effectively halted. Louis XIV’s ultimate defeat was not due to his numerous strategic mistakes, but to the alteration in the relative position of France within the European political system attendant on the advent of the English Revolutions of 1640 and 1688.30 It was the economic rise of English capitalism and the political consolidation of its State in the later 17th century which ‘overtook’ French Absolutism, even in the epoch of the latter’s own ascent. The real victors of the War of the Spanish Succession were the merchants and bankers of London: a world-wide British imperialism was ushered in by it. The late feudal Spanish State had been brought down by its French counterpart and rival, aided by the early bourgeois State in Holland. The late feudal French State was stopped in its path by two capitalist States of unequal power – England, Holland – assisted by its Austrian counterpart. Bourbon Absolutism was intrinsically much stronger and more unified than Spanish Absolutism had been: but the forces arrayed against it were proportionately more powerful too. The strenuous inner preparations of Louis XIV’s reign for outer dominion proved vain. The hour of supremacy for Versailles, which seemed so near in the Europe of the 1660’s, never struck.
The advent of the Regency in 1715 announced the social reaction to this failure. The higher nobility, its pent-up grievances against royal autocracy suddenly released, staged an immediate come-back. The Regent secured the agreement of the Parlement of Paris to set aside Louis XIV’s will in exchange for restoring its traditional right of remonstrance: government passed into the hands of peers who promptly terminated the Ministerial system of the late king, assuming direct power themselves in the so-called polysynodie. Both the noblesse d’épée and the noblesse de robe were thus institutionally reinstated by the Regency. The new epoch was in fact to accentuate the overt class character of Absolutism: the 18th century witnessed a regression of non-noble influence in the State apparatus, and the collective dominance of an increasingly unified upper aristocracy. The magnate take-over of the Regency itself did not last: under Fleury and then two weak kings who succeeded him, the decision-making system at the summit of the State reverted to the old Ministerial pattern, now no longer controlled by a commanding monarch. But the nobility henceforward maintained a limpet grip on the highest offices of government: from 1714 to 1789, there were only three Ministers who were not titled aristocrats.31 The judicial magistrature of the parlements now likewise formed a closed stratum of nobles, both in Paris and the provinces, from which commoners were effectively barred. The royal intendants, once the scourge of provincial landowners, became a virtually hereditary caste in their turn: 14 of them in the reign of Louis XVI were sons of former intendants.32 In the Church, all archbishops and bishops were of noble origin by the second half of the century, and most abbacies, priories and canonries were controlled by the same class. In the Army, the top military commands were solidly occupied by grandees; purchase of companies by roturiers was banned in the 1760’s, when it became necessary to have unambiguous noble descent in order to qualify for the rank of officer. The aristocratic class as a whole retained a rigorous late feudal statute: it was a legally defined order of some 250,000 persons, which was exempt from the bulk of taxation and enjoyed a monopoly of the highest echelons of the bureaucracy, judiciary, clergy and army. Its subdivisions were now punctiliously defined in theory, and between the highest peerage and the lowest rural hobereaux there existed a great gulf. But in practice the lubricants of money and marriage made its upper reaches in many ways a more flexibly articulated group than ever before. The French nobility in the age of the Enlightenment possessed complete security of tenure within the structures of the Absolutist State. Yet an irreducible sentiment of discomfort and friction subsisted between the two, even in this last period of optimal union between aristocracy and monarchy. For Absolutism, no matter how congenial its personnel and how attractive its service, remained an inaccessible and irresponsible power wielded over the heads of the nobility as a whole. The condition of its efficacy as a State was its structural distance from the class from which it was recruited and whose interests it defended. Absolutism in France never became unquestioningly trusted and accepted by the aristocracy on which it rested: its decisions were not accountable to the titled order which gave it life – necessarily so, as we shall see, because of the inherent nature of the class itself; yet also perilously so, because of the danger of unconsidered or arbitrary actions taken by the executive rebounding on it. Plenitude of royal power, even when mildly exercised, bred seigneurial reserve towards it. Montesquieu – President of the Parlement of Bordeaux under the easygoing regime of Fleury – gave unanswerable expression to the new type of aristocratic oppositionism characteristic of the century.
In fact, the Bourbon monarchy of the 18th century made very few moves of a ‘levelling’ type against the ‘intermediary powers’ which Montesquieu and his consorts cherished so intensely. The Ancien Régime in France preserved its bewildering jungle of heteroclite jurisdictions, divisions and institutions – pays d’états, pays d’éléctions, parlements, sénéschaussées, généralités – down to the Revolution. After Louis XIV, little further rationalization of the polity occurred: no uniform customs tariff, tax-system, legal code or local administration was ever created. The monarchy’s one attempt to impose a new conformity on a corporate body was its persistent effort to secure theological obedience in the clergy by persecution of Jansenism – which was invariably and vigorously combated by the Parlement of Paris in the name of traditional Gallicanism. The anachronistic quarrel over this ideological issue became the chief flash-point of relations between Absolutism and the noblesse de robe from the Regency to the epoch of Choiseul, when the Jesuits were formally expelled from France by the parlements, in a symbolic victory for Gallicanism. Much more serious, however, was to be the financial deadlock which eventually developed between the monarchy and the magistrature. Louis XIV had left a State massively encumbered with debts; the Regency had halved these by the Law system; but the costs of foreign policy from the War of the Austrian Succession onwards, combined with the extravagance of the court, kept the exchequer in steady and deepening deficit. Successive attempts to levy new taxes, puncturing the fiscal immunity of the aristocracy, were resisted or sabotaged in the Parlements and provincial Estates, by refusal to register edicts or presentation of indignant remonstrances. The objective contradictions of Absolutism here unfolded in their plainest form. The monarchy sought to tax the wealth of the nobility, while the nobility demanded controls on the policies of the monarchy: the aristocracy, in effect, refused to alienate its economic privileges without gaining political rights over the conduct of the royal State. In their struggle against the Absolutist governments over this issue, the judicial oligarchy of the Parlements came increasingly to use the radical language of the philosophes: migrant bourgeois notions of liberty and representation started to haunt the rhetoric of one of the most inveterately conservative and caste-like branches of the French aristocracy.33 By the 1770’s and 1780’s, a curious cultural contamination of sections of the nobility by the estate below it was pronounced in France.
For the 18th century had meanwhile seen a rapid growth in the ranks and fortunes of the local bourgeoisie. The epoch from the Regency onwards was in general one of economic expansion, with a secular increase of prices, relative agrarian prosperity (at least in the period 1730–74), and demographic recovery: the population of France rose from some 18/19 to 25/26 million between 1700 and 1789. While agriculture remained the overwhelmingly dominant branch of production, manufactures and commerce registered notable advances. French industry increased some 60 per cent in output in the course of the century;34 true factories started to appear in the textile sector; the foundations of iron and coal industries were laid. Far more rapid, however, was the progress of trade, above all in the international and colonial arenas. Foreign commerce proper quadrupled from 1716–20 to 1784–8, with a regular export surplus. Colonial trade achieved faster growth with the rise of the sugar, coffee and cotton plantations in the Antilles: in the last years before the Revolution, it came to two-thirds as much as French foreign trade.35 The commercial boom naturally stimulated urbanization; there was a wave of new building in the towns, and by the end of the century the provincial cities of France still outdistanced those of England in size and numbers, despite the much higher level of industrialization across the Channel. Meanwhile, sale of offices had dwindled away, with the aristocratic closure of the State apparatus. Absolutism in the 18th century switched increasingly to public loans, which did not create the same degree of intimacy with the State: rentiers did not receive ennoblement or tax-immunity as officiers had done. The wealthiest single group within the French capitalist class remained the financiers, whose speculative investments reaped the huge profits of army contracts, tax farms or royal borrowing. But by and large, the simultaneous diminution of commoner access to the feudal State and development of a commercial economy outside it, emancipated the bourgeoisie from its subaltern dependence on Absolutism. The merchants, manufacturers and shipowners of the Enlightenment, and the lawyers and journalists who grew up together with them, now increasingly prospered outside the ambit of the State, with inevitable results for the political autonomy of the bourgeois class as a whole.
The monarchy, for its part, now proved incapable of protecting bourgeois interests, even when they nominally coincided with those of Absolutism itself. Nowhere was this clearer than in the external policies of the late Bourbon State. The wars of the century followed an unerringly traditional pattern. Small annexations of land in Europe always in practice achieved priority over defense or acquisition of overseas colonies; maritime and commercial power was sacrificed to territorial militarism.36 Fleury, bent on peace, successfully ensured the absorption of Lorraine in the brief campaigns over the Polish Succession in the 1730’s, from which England stayed aloof. The War of the Austrian Succession in the 1740’s, however, saw the British fleet punish French shipping all the way from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, inflicting huge trading losses on France, while Saxe conquered the Southern Netherlands in an accomplished but futile land campaign: peace restored the status quo ante on both sides, but the strategic lessons were already clear to Pitt in England. The Seven Years’ War (1756–63), in which France committed itself to join an Austrian attack on Prussia against every rational dynastic interest, brought disaster for the Bourbon colonial empire. The continental war was this time fought listlessly by French armies in Westphalia, while the naval war launched by Britain swept away Canada, India, West Africa and the West Indies. Choiseul’s diplomacy recuperated the Bourbon possessions in the Antilles at the Peace of Paris, but the chance of France presiding over a mercantile imperialism on a world scale was over. The American War of Independence allowed Paris to achieve a political revenge on London, by proxy: but the French role in North America, although vital to the success of the American Revolution, was essentially a spoiling operation, which brought no positive gains to France. Indeed, it was the costs of Bourbon intervention in the War of American Independence which forced on the ultimate fiscal crisis of French Absolutism at home. By 1788, the State debt was so large – payment of interest on it accounting for nearly 50 per cent of current expenditure – and the budgetary deficit so acute, that Louis XVI’s last ministers, Calonne and Loménie de Brienne, resolved to impose a land tax on the nobility and clergy. The Parlements furiously resisted these schemes; the monarchy in desperation decreed their dissolution; then, retreating before the uproar from the propertied classes, reestablished them; and finally, capitulating to the Parlements’ demands for an Estates-General before any tax-reform was granted, convoked the three Estates amidst the disastrous grain shortage, widespread unemployment and popular misery of 1789. The aristocratic reaction against Absolutism therewith passed into the bourgeois revolution which overthrew it. Fittingly, the historical collapse of the French Absolutist State was tied directly to the inflexibility of its feudal formation. The fiscal crisis which detonated the revolution of 1789 was provoked by its juridical inability to tax the class which it represented. The very rigidity of the nexus between State and nobility ultimately precipitated their common downfall.
1. P. S. Lewis, Later Mediaeval France: the Polity, London 1968, pp. 102–4.
2. For this point, see J. Russell Major, Representative Institutions in Renaissance France, 1421–1559, Madison 1960, p. 9.
3. Major, Representative Institutions in Renaissance France, p. 6.
4. There is a particularly trenchant statement of the general thesis that Estates-Generals in France and elsewhere nearly always served, not hindered, the promotion of royal power in the Renaissance, in Major’s excellent study: Representative Institutions in Renaissance France, pp. 16–20. In fact, Major perhaps presses the argument somewhat too unilaterally; certainly, in the course of the 16th century, it became steadily less true, if it had once been so, that monarchs ‘had no fear of the assemblies of estates’ (p. 16). But this is nevertheless one of the most illuminating single discussions of the topic in any language.
5. See the convergent opinions expressed by Lewis and Major: P. S. Lewis, ‘The Failure of the French Mediaeval Estates’, Past and Present, No. 23, November 1962, pp. 3–24, and J. Russell Major, The Estates-General of 1560, Princeton 1951, pp. 75, 119–20.
6. Major, Representative Institutions in Renaissance France, pp. 126–7.
7. This thesis is advanced in the stimulating essay by Brian Pearce, ‘The Huguenots and the Holy League: Class, Politics and Religion in France in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century’ (unpublished), who suggests that the Northern towns were consequently more concerned with the consolidation of French national unity. However, many of the main ports in the South and West also remained Catholic: Bordeaux, Nantes and Marseille all rallied to the League. Marseille suffered in consequence, pro-Spanish policies depriving it of its traditional Levantine trade: G. Livet, Les Guerres de Religion, Paris 1966, pp. 105–6.
8. Livet, Les Guerres de Religion, pp. 7–8.
9. J. H. Elliott, Europe Divided 1559–1598, London 1968, p. 96, which includes inter alia a skilful narrative of this period in French history, in the setting of the international political struggles of the age.
10. For a political sociology of the municipal leadership of the League in Paris at the height of the Religious Wars, see J. H. Salmon, ‘The Paris Sixteen, 1584–1594: The Social Analysis of a Revolutionary Movement’, Journal of Modern History, 44, No. 4, December 1972, pp. 540–76. Salmon shows the importance in the Council of Sixteen of the middle and lower ranks of the legal profession, and stresses its manipulation of the plebeian masses, together with a provision of some economic relief, under its dictatorship. A brief comparative analysis is sketched in H. G. Koenigsberger, ‘The Organization of Revolutionary Parties in France and the Netherlands during the Sixteenth Century’, Journal of Modern History, 27, December 1955, pp. 335–51. But much work remains to be done on the League, one of the most complex and enigmatic phenomena of the century; the movement which invented urban barricades has yet to find its Marxist historian.
11. This point is emphasized by J. H. Salmon, ‘Venality of Office and Popular Sedition in 17th Century France’, Past and Present, July 1967, pp. 41–3.
12. Menna Prestwich, ‘From Henri III to Louis XIV’, in H. Trevor-Roper (ed.), The Age of Expansion, London 1968, p. 199.
13. Prestwich, ‘From Henri III to Louis XIV’, p. 199.
14. There is a good discussion of this phenomenon in A. D. Lublinskaya, French Absolutism: The Crucial Phase 1620–1629, Cambridge 1968, pp. 234–43; for the size of the take from the taille appropriated by tax-farmers, see p. 308 (13 million out of 19 million livres in the mid 1620’s).
15. ‘Or to change the metaphor: if royal authority was a brilliant sun, there was another power which reflected, concentrated and tempered its light, a shade enclosing that source of energy on which no human eye could rest without being blinded. We refer to the Parlements, above all the Parlement of Paris.’ Ernst Kossmann, La Fronde, Leyden 1954, p. 23.
16. B. F. Porshnev, Les Soulèvements Populaires en France de 1623 à 1648, pp. 547–60.
17. Prestwich, ‘From Henri III to Louis XIV’, p. 203; Mousnier, Peasant Uprisings, London 1971, p. 307.
18. This is Porshnev’s view in Les Soulèvements Populaires en France.
19. For this aspect, see Kossmann, La Fronde, pp. 117–38.
20. Kossmann, La Fronde, pp. 20, 24 250–2.
21. Pierre Goubert, ‘Les Problèmes de la Noblesse au XVIIe Siècle’, XIIIth International Congress of Historical Sciences, Moscow 1970, p. 5.
22. Pierre Goubert, Louis XIV et Vingt Millions de Français, pp. 164, 166.
23. Goubert, Louis XIV et Vingt Millions de Français, p. 72.
24. J. Stoye, Europe Unfolding 1648–1688, London 1969, p. 223; Goubert, Louis XIV et Vingt Millions de Français, p. 186.
25. Roland Mousnier, Peasant Uprisings, London 1971, p. 115, justly stresses this point, commenting that the rebellions of 1675 in Brittany and Bordeaux were the last serious social upheavals of the century.
26. Goubert, Louis XIV et Vingt Millions de Français, pp. 90–2.
27. Even in a certain sense its cultural ideals: ‘The newly acquired symmetry and order of the parade-ground provided, for Louis XIV and his contemporaries, the model to which life and art must alike conform; and the pas cadencé of Martinet – whose name is in itself a programme – echoed again in the majestic monotony of interminable alexandrines.’ Michael Roberts, ‘The Military Revolution 1560–1660’, Essays in Swedish History, London 1967, p. 206.
28. The Cardinals had sought to subject the aristocracy to disguised imposts, in the form of ‘commutations’ of the military ban owed on fiefs. These were much disliked by the gentry and were abandoned by Louis XIV. See Pierre Deyon, ‘A Propos des Rapports entre la Noblesse Francaise et la Monarchie Absolue pendant la Première Moitié du XVIIe Siècle’, Revue Historique, CCXXXI, 1964, pp. 355–6.
29. Goubert, Louis XIV et Vingt Millions de Français, pp. 158–62.
30. Louis XIV, of course, proved unable to appreciate this change – hence his constant diplomatic blunders. The temporary weakness of England in the 1660’s, when Charles II was a French pensioner, led him to underestimate the island ever afterwards, even when its central political importance in Western Europe was already obvious. Louis XIV’s failure to extend any preemptive aid to James II in 1688, before the landing of William III, was thus to be one of the most fatal errors of a career well supplied with them.
31. Albert Goodwin, ‘The Social Structure and Economic and Political Attitudes of the French Nobility in the 18th Century’, XIIth International Congress of Historical Sciences, Rapports, I, p. 361.
32. J. McManners, ‘France’, in Goodwin (ed.), The European Nobility in the 18th Century, pp. 33–5.
33. For the attitudes of the Parlements of the last years of the Ancien Régime, see J. Egret, La Pré-Révolution Française, 1787–1788, Paris 1962, pp. 149–60.
34. A. Soboul, La Révolution Française, I, Paris 1964, p. 45.
35. J. Lough, An Introduction to 18th Century France, London 1960, pp. 71–3.
36. The naval budget never totalled more than half that of England: Dorn, Competition for Empire, p. 116. Dorn presents a telling account of the general deficiencies of the French fleets in this epoch.
